


Ned's New Life

by Lilliburlero



Category: 14th Century CE RPF
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Child Marriage, Dante - Freeform, Gen, John of Gaunt Is A Shitehawk, La Vita Nuova, Literary References, Ludicrously Precocious Medieval Kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 01:18:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1839139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Edward, future Duke of Aumerle, goes to Lisbon to marry a king's daughter.  But it's not a kissing story.</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: period-typical dynastic child marriage: no sexual contact is implied or described, in fact, the reverse.  (This is not a kissing story.)</p><p>*</p><p>for strangeparticles, to the prompt: "Aumerle and York: 'It's all <i>your</i> fault' "</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ned's New Life

**Author's Note:**

> I don't actually know anything about the dynastic wrangling over the thrones of Portugal and Castile except that John of Gaunt was involved in it (rarely a hopeful sign), and at one point the future Duke of Aumerle, aged eight, was betrothed to Beatrice of Portugal, who was the same age. This story proceeds from that point of ignorance towards more ignorance, and should be regarded as a simple _jeu d'esprit_ with dollops of Gratuitous Dante.

Ned _likes_ Richard. He likes him an awful lot, actually. He should like him better than anyone except God, since he’s the King, and he’s pretty sure he does.  But Richard isn’t Ned’s best friend. Richard has his own best friends, anyway, boys bigger than Ned, and of whom Ned refuses to be scared.  Ned’s best friend, just at the moment, is Hob the falconer.  They don’t talk much.  (Richard and his friends talk all the time, and about really unimportant things, like clothes and music.) The hawks don’t like noise and chatter.  They get into a bate.  Father says that Uncle John is in a bate with the King of Portugal again.  If he could see Uncle John swing upside-down from his perch, roll his yellow eyes and bang his―wing― _sails_ ―about like Gos does, Ned wouldn’t mind meeting Uncle John again.  But he suspects that all Father means is that Uncle John’s lips went so white they disappeared and he said the things that Ned shouldn’t repeat because they pierce Lord Jesus’s side and run nails through His poor hands and feet.  Uncle John is very hard on Our Lord, Ned reflects solemnly. 

So when he’s summoned from the mews to the King’s presence he feels mildly vexed.  He thinks that is probably a sin to feel that, and stores it up to confess.  Ned reckons his confessions should be more specific: lots and lots of his sins are the undistinguished _those which I cannot now remember_ sort.  He is going to be married to the daughter of the King of Portugal.  He turned eight at Michaelmas. He can’t help feeling his trespasses ought to be more memorable and dramatic by now.

When he gets to the apartments set aside for the King’s use, Ned’s surprised to find no-one there but Richard and Robert de Vere. Well, there are all the King’s people, of course, but they don’t count.  He had thought that Father would probably be there.  Richard whispers in de Vere’s ear.  Richard is nearly as tall as his friend, even though de Vere is a man and Richard is still really a boy.  Ned is rather short, though he is very strong for his age, Hob says so. It must be a dismissal the King has said, because de Vere smiles, takes the King’s outstretched hand and kisses it, then sweeps out, ruffling Ned’s hair as he passes him.  Ned is too old to have his hair ruffled by the Earl of Oxford, who is not even a member of the royal house, and he must look very cross about it, because Richard laughs and opens his arms.

―Your hair’s all sticking up like a coxcomb.  Come here.  He nudges a low stool with his foot. 

Ned is not too old to have his head stroked by the King by the fireplace in what is usually Mama's solar. That is a sign of favour.  It would make him feel very babyish if someone else did it, especially a woman. But he is very careful to make the proper courtesy before he approaches the settle, and that makes Richard roar with laughter again.

A servant comes with a dish of sweets.  Ned takes one; it is the colour of Gos’s eyes, and dusted with something that looks like flour.  It fills his mouth with sickly, faintly perfumed glue. He thinks he is losing his childhood taste for sweets, and plans to say so when his teeth stop being stuck together; it sounds like a suitably sophisticated thing to say to the King. But before he can speak Richard remarks,

―Spit it into the fire if you don’t like it.  There was once a Turkish prince who sold his brother and sisters into slavery for sweets like those.

So Ned has to swallow it.  He knows a command when he hears one. Most of the horrible stuff goes down, but there’s a sticky clot left in the back of his throat, like when you have a cold, but sweet.

―When do you go to Lisbon, cousin?

It’s one of those things grown-ups ask, already knowing the answer. Richard isn’t a proper grown-up, but being King means you have to talk like one.

―Father says as soon as the weather is better, my lord.

―And do you know what you’ll do there?

Ned sits up a little straighter. ―Of course.  I’m to be betrothed to the princess Beatrice.

―And what do you know about her?

Ned knows _everything_. 

―She’s the daughter of King Ferdinand of Portugal.  _His_ father was King Peter.  King Peter’s sister was called Mary and she was Mama’s father’s mother.  And Aunt Constance’s.  It’s because Uncle John is the rightful king of Castile.

Richard snorts gently. ―Very well. But what do you know about _Beatrice_?

Ned frowns.  He has told him.  And then it occurs to him for the first time that Beatrice is actually a person, a flesh-and-blood girl who even now might be sitting in front of a fire a thousand miles away, eating sweets.  Hers are probably nicer.  He hopes, for her sake, they’re not nastier.  And he has to marry her, and live with her, and get children on her; not for ages yet, because they’re both only eight, but eventually, that’s what he has to do.  

―She’s about my age, my lord.

―I know a story about a boy of your age who fell in love with a girl called Beatrice. Would you like to hear it?

―Yes, my lord. 

Ned can’t have looked enthusiastic, because Richard laughs.  ―You don’t look like you do, coz.

―Well.  Is it a kissing story?

―It’s not, actually.  No.  No kissing.

Ned sighs with relief and leans against Richard’s long calf. Richard tangles his fingers in Ned’s hair. (Ned thinks it is funny how Richard likes to touch people all the time.  He supposes it’s because he’s King, and set apart from other people a little bit.  It’s like he has to make sure you’re real.) Ned doesn’t think it is a very interesting story, not at the time.  It doesn’t have any of the things he likes in it.  There are no wild beasts, or tournaments, or wicked sorcerers, or princes in disguise as beggarmen, or wondrous sea voyages, or animals that can speak. It’s just about a boy who meets a girl at her father’s party, and falls in love with her, and then he grows up but he’s still in love with her, and he sighs and weeps a lot and then she dies.  But Richard has a nice voice for telling stories (he can’t sing; their cousin Henry, who can play everything and makes up his own tunes in parts, says he’s the King of All the Croaking Cormorants) and you can’t very well tell the King he’s being boring.

―It sounds like he was more in love with being in love than he was with Beatrice, Ned says when he’s finished.

―So he was. Clever Ned.  Run along now.

Over the weeks that follow, and especially on the journey to Lisbon (when he stops being sick: ships, to his shame, make him just as sick as carriages; when he is a man he will probably still have to sail in ships, but he will ride everywhere in the open air, and never again sit in a box on wheels swallowing bile and unable to talk or turn his head or think about anything except not puking on his father’s shoes) Ned finds himself remembering more of the story than he thought he did.  The bits that come back to him are mostly about the young lord who is Love himself, and the way Ned imagines him, he looks like Richard, half a man, and half a boy.  He imagines Richard coming into his cabin carrying Beatrice asleep in his arms, covered by a cloth the colour of blood, just like in the story.  He knows she is naked under the cloth, and that makes him feel oddly hot and tight and bothered, as if he is about to cry, or laugh uncontrollably.  Then he thinks of Richard all dressed in white, like the Lord of Love, coming and sitting beside his bed and saying _I am the centre of the circle_.  Gradually, Ned begins to confuse Richard and Beatrice in his imagination: she takes on his red-gold colouring, his long bony fingers and slim frame, the light, casual tones of his voice, which sound as if he at once doesn’t mean the things he says, and means them far too much.

As it happens, when Ned finally meets Beatrice, she _is_ wearing white.  She’s in mourning for her younger brother.  He says he’s sorry to hear it.

―Thank you. But he’s with God. It's a comfort, she says in a careful, schooled voice.

She scratches the nape of her neck, which she always does, he will discover, when she’s being shy.  She’s a perfectly ordinary girl, not tall, not small. Taller than Ned.  Her hair is nearly black, darker than his, and her eyes are dark brown.  Her front teeth are big, with a gap between them. They talk in French, but her French sounds very different from Ned’s French, and they often have politely to repeat quite simple things.  They both raise their voices when they do this, so often by the end of a couple of phrases they are almost shouting.  She is not interested in hawks or tournaments.  He is not interested in jewellery or pictures in books of hours or the new sort of needlework that one of her ladies is teaching her.  They are both about equally uninterested in horses, so they talk about horses for a bit.  He doesn’t dislike her, but love is definitely not as he’d been led to expect.  He feels the sort of heavy tiredness you only get from doing nothing at all.  He misses Hob.  He thinks about Richard wearing dazzling white, white hosen and white cotehardie and white houppelande, and coming to sit by his bed, saying mysterious, important things. He wants to go home.

And then, one day, it _is_ all off, and they’re going back to England.

―Your charming and ever-winsome uncle, Father says, ―has contrived to make himself so odious to our allies that they’re now our enemies.  They’re seeking a papal dispensation.  She’s going to marry John of Castile instead.  I’m sorry.  It’s all been a bit of a waste of time.

John of Castile is not as old as Father, but pretty old, twenty, maybe twenty-five.  Ned must look upset, or ashamed, because he adds, ―It’s nothing to do with you or Beatrice.  It’s not your fault.

Suddenly Ned is overwhelmed by the futility of it all, the silly shouty conversations about nothing, the prospect of days and days more sea-sickness, his visions of Richard in flowing white and the dream-Beatrice under the crimson cloth, the real Beatrice standing with her toes turned in, then self-consciously correcting her posture, scratching the nape of her neck.  His body goes numb and weightless and his ears ring.  He’s fainted once before, when a furious Gos opened his forearm from elbow to wrist, and the surgeon had to seal it with hot oil to stop it rotting and killing him.  He doesn’t faint now.  He must have staggered a bit, though, because Father puts out a hand and says, 

―Whoa, mind that painting with your sticky little paws.

He has, he sees when he straightens up again, left two perfect, grimy hand-prints on the fresco. It's of the Wedding at Cana, the bride surrounded by smirking maids.  ―No,’ he says viciously. ―I know. I’m just a boy, and you and Uncle are men.  It’s _your_ fault.

He senses, somehow, it’s not going to be the first time he says something like that.

 


End file.
